Dual monitors and fullscreen fiasco, is there a work around?

Here's one simple method to watch full-screen movies on one monitor while continuing to work on another.

In my case, I have three monitors and I'm running Lion on an older Mac Pro (2 x 2.66 Ghz Dual-Core Xeon).

To do this I use QuickTime Player 7 to play the movie, not iTunes, and I'm watching movies that are already on one of my Mac's hard drives.

1. Open QuickTime Player 7

2. Open Quicktime Preferences

3. Select the "Full Screen" menu - you'll see icons for your monitors.

4. Click the image of the monitor where you want your full-screen movie. It should then be highlighted in red with the QuickTime icon inside.

* Be sure "Background Color: . . . Show on all displays" is unchecked *

5. Close Preferences and choose "File > Open File", select your movie and open it. It will open in a small window on your main monitor.

6. Command-F will send the movie, full-screen, to the monitor you chose in Preferences. Your other displays will be kept active so you can continue working.

I hope this helps.

Also, my apologies if this solution is already covered in this forum - I didn't want to read through all 45 pages.

wayne

"Here's one simple method to watch full-screen movies on one monitor while continuing to work on another."

Thanks for this but it just a work-around for a tiny piece of what Apple broke (not your fault!). I mainly need this for business meetings to show some program on a projector while I'm looking at others on the laptop screen.

What's really sad is that OSX is getting worse at this while Windows (at least Win7 - don't use Win8) is much better at it than before and better than OSX.

It's good for Apple that MS has totally confused their current and potential customers with Win 8 and it's multiple versions and GUIs since some of the new Win8 laptops with touchscreens are pretty amazing and blow away the MBP for user experience. I hope Apple / Jony Ive get's their act together this year before MS does. MS usually messes up on version 1 of anything they do but they keep pushing and pushing and by version 3 (DOS 3.1, Win98, Win7) usually get it right and grab the market.

Embarrasing.

Sort it out Apple. I have to use Quicktime 7 everytime I want to play a video fullscreen on my second monitor.

Just to remind anyone reading, please send feedback to Apple, if they get bombarded they might remove thier thumbs out of thier bums.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

I really think that if Apple had any intention of fixing this they would have done so long ago. They aren't going to fix it. We can keep reporting it... but my guess is they have a filter set to simply send them to the junk mail folder. 🙂

Best to simply learn to live without it. - JamesJM

It's been a long time Apple is letting me down, such stupid bugs and bad implementations, it's really annoying.

To resolve this issue I tried many apps and one that worked for me was Plex. It gives me a nice UI to look for my videos and music and I can still use the other monitor.

The only thing I couldn't find a workaround is mission control, I can't use it or both screens will enter mission control.

I've posted my feedback here : http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

I want to use an external monitor, but when I use an app in fullscreen on my mbp display the external monitor only displays a gray screen. It's really buggin me, because I've been using an external monitor on my previous laptop which allowed me to (e.g.) watch football games on one screen and use chrome on the other.

Assuming that iOS creates a new screen object when I click the fullscreen button, the best solution would be to let the user decide to either pin one of these screenobjects to the secondary screen or to make an array of screen-objects that displays 2 of the objects in this array at a time: one on my mbp display and one on my external monitor.

Option 1 is fairly easy to implement. A screenid should be linked to a monitorid and that's it. It would be even better if I could choose to link an application in fullscreen to any screen. This way I'd be able to watch a footballgame on my mbp display and use chrome, any other application or the desktop screen on my external desktop.

Option 2 isn't that hard either. In the screenarray the appscreen (with the calculator, clock etc.) gets index 0, desktopscreen gets index 1 and the applications the user uses in fullscreen get index from 1 to unlimited. Then, if I have the desktopscreen opened on my mbp, the external monitor should display mbp-index + 1 (if the screen is on the right of the mbp, else the external monitor should display mbp-index - 1), which is the last application I used in fullscreen in this case. If I have the appscreen opened on my mbp, the external monitor should display the desktop screen and so on.

Please send your complaints to apple, because the current options for functioning of external monitors is completely r-e-t-a-r-d-e-d. So sad, just bought a new mbp and didn't know about this. I don't think that I would have bought a mpb if I had known all this. Apple should be ashamed..

Mac 101

Don't get it ? I know it's still possible to do what I described, but not when using fullscreens. And that's lame imo.

That's why this thread has been going for over 18 months. We've all said that Apple are utterly WRONG in thinking that this feature is anything but a pain in the derriere; an utter waste of screen estate.

But Apple don't care/listen.

Oh, Glenny, Glenny, Glenny.

Who are these people that post the Mac 101 links? I would like to speak to these gurus and bow down to them. I mean if 46 pages worth of people have overlooked this simple solution, we have seriously overcomplicated our lives. Unless this is an actual issue????

Jaqinho wrote:

I've posted my feedback here : http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Please send your complaints to apple, because the current options for functioning of external monitors is completely r-e-t-a-r-d-e-d. So sad, just bought a new mbp and didn't know about this. I don't think that I would have bought a mpb if I had known all this. Apple should be ashamed..

I can't believe that you spent so much money without bothering to check whether your wants and needs would be fulfilled by the purchase. Caveat Emptor indeed.

I can't believe that you spent so much money without bothering to check whether your wants and needs would be fulfilled by the purchase. Caveat Emptor indeed.

What do you mean "so much money"? It was like 30 dollars for the lion upgrade, right? And while there are probably hundreds of ways to do "fullscreen", I can understand why people asume it the Windows way since there are not really that many alterntives - it's a quite famous OS and has been doing it since version 3.10 at least. You can look it up on the internet. Please don't go into details wether it's called maximize or fullscreen or what not. Try to crawl out of your Apple cave now and then.

One of today's most upvoted AMAs on Reddit is one with the Microsoft Surface team that perfectly exemplifies everything Apple is doing wrong with regard to this issue. Check out the most upvoted question/issue for the Microsoft Surface team:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18063g/i_am_panos_panay_with_the_surface_w indows_8_pro/

Sound familiar? Though it has to do with scaling and not fullscreening, it seems the Microsoft team also made similar oversights/compromises with the Surface's dual monitor support. Notice however, that the first thing Microsoft did today is acknowledge that this is a a critical feature and inform us that "The Windows team is aggressively working on this feature to fix this for all high resolution Windows devices." Where is a similar message from Apple? Keep in mind Microsoft not only answered the question, but had the balls to go out there and field it and others like it on one of the most notorious forums on the Internet -- yet Apple has not even responded on their own forum; a forum that is not only owned and carefully moderated by their employees, but also brimming with legions of religious fanboys frothing at the mouth and ready to confuse, ridicule, and troll away legitimate concerns.

As a rMBP owner and longtime Apple user, it doesn't concern me that Apple made an oversight for one of the most crucial features a modern power user requires: a seamless dual monitor experience. Designing software, especially operating systems, is hardwork and critical requirements frequently slip through the cracks. It happens to Apple, Microsoft, Google, and even Red Hat almost equally. What concerns me is Apple's utter lack of acknowledgement or feedback on this issue, despite the obvious and enormous demand for this demonstrated by the activity on this thread and other similar forums.

Phero2 wrote:

I can't believe that you spent so much money without bothering to check whether your wants and needs would be fulfilled by the purchase. Caveat Emptor indeed.

What do you mean "so much money"? It was like 30 dollars for the lion upgrade, right? And while there are probably hundreds of ways to do "fullscreen", I can understand why people asume it the Windows way since there are not really that many alterntives - it's a quite famous OS and has been doing it since version 3.10 at least. You can look it up on the internet. Please don't go into details wether it's called maximize or fullscreen or what not. Try to crawl out of your Apple cave now and then.

I was not replying to you